The university students, for their part, are active in their respective higher education centers, organizing in conjunction with Tribuna Israelita "Jewish Cultural Days" to transmit a greater knowledge of Judaism in general and of the Mexican community in particular.
The Mexican Federation of Jewish Youth groups and represents all these instances. The dynamic participation of Jewish women's organizations, represented by the Feminine Federation, is reflected in national and community projects. For more than eight decades, they have established aid programs for different social sectors of the country, providing support to hospitals, nursing homes, schools, orphanages, nurseries, the Red Cross, and government social work agencies, performing important work in cases of natural disasters.
Aware of its environment, the Jewish Community promotes and participates in a large number of innovative social projects aimed at improving the quality of life of the less favored sectors. Through institutions dedicated to fostering relations between Israel and Mexico, academic, cultural, technological, and commercial exchanges take place. New needs and new challenges gave rise to the creation of various inter-community organizations, which with the participation of thousands of volunteers work in the prevention and treatment of addictions; domestic violence; integration into society of people with a disability; technologic education; business training; promotion of ventures; health programs and activities for older adults.
Intellectuals, academics, scientists, artists, large, small, and medium-sized businessmen, public officials, and leaders of civil society organizations, all of them members of the Jewish Community of Mexico, contribute their work daily to promote the development of the country.
With more than a century of organized life, the Jewish Community remains firm, united, active, and vibrant, integrated into the social and cultural mosaic of Mexico. Mexican Jewish Community. Marketing cookies are used to track visitors across websites allowing the display of ads that are relevant and engaging for the visitor. Whilst we do not display any advertising on the WJC website, allowing marketing cooking may allow other sites to see that you have visited our site.
Characterized by its strongly traditionalist communities, ranging from Orthodox to Conservative, and its variety of institutions, Mexican Jewry is comprised of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Levantine Jews, and is considered one of the most active Jewish communities in the world.
Jews first arrived in Mexico as Conversos and they accompanied Hernan Cortes in the conquering of the Aztecs. Others integrated into broader society and became prominent members of the elite, or even in some cases, clergy officials.
However, the Spanish crown began enforcing its severe Inquisition policies in Mexico in , opening an Inquisition office in Mexico City.
There was an influx of Jewish immigration from Portugal in the late 16th century, but many of these Converso arrivals were ultimately prosecuted by Inquisition officials in the new world. Despite this, Conversos were active participants in colonial society, and were engaged in various occupations, including craftsmanship.
These draconian policies continued into the 17th century, and as a result, the number of Conversos arriving in Mexico was drastically reduced. Over the course of the 17th century, hundreds of people were prosecuted and convicted by the Inquisition in Mexico. Some were made to reconcile with the Church while others were either deported or executed. In due course, such extreme persecutory actions towards Conversos diminished, but by then the immigration of Crypto-Jews to Mexico had all but disappeared.
There was a large level of assimilation among those who remained in the colony, and the practice of Jewish customs and traditions was lost to many over time. Mexico gained its independence from Spain in and recognized Catholicism as the official religion. Despite the abolition of the Inquisition in the country, very few Jews lived in Mexico. When Maximilian of Austria arrived as Emperor of Mexico in , some European Jews from countries such as Austria, Belgium, and France came with his court and openly practiced Judaism.
The Constitution paved the way for religious freedom in Mexico. As a result, there were large increases in Jewish immigration to Mexico, beginning in with the arrival of Russian Jews who came to the country after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Then he suggested that "Yahweh" might have been what the old man called God. Neulander also researched the origins of alleged crypto-Jewish customs, such as celebrating Saint Esther's Day, burying or burning hair and nail clippings, and playing with a dreidel.
To Hordes, these practices were dramatically Jewish. But as Neulander dug into historical and folklore archives, she learned that Esther is a Spanish folk saint and has been for hundreds of years. As for burning hair and nails, the practice is found in folk cultures throughout the Western world, and was widespread even when the Inquisition was attributing it only to Jews. Neulander also found that the dreidel does not exist in Sephardic culture -- it is an Ashkenazic object that postdates the Inquisition.
What does exist, throughout Latin America, is the trompita, a wooden top that children play with regardless of their religion. Other matters also troubled Neulander. For instance, when she looked into Loggie Carrasco's "colonial-era" rosary, she found that it was identical to items that could be bought in virtually any Catholic gift shop -- and that were approved by the Church only in As for pemphigus vulgaris, the disease that Hordes had said was common among Jews, it predominantly afflicts Ashkenazic, not Sephardic, Jews, and in fact occurs in Mediterranean peoples of several ethnicities.
Still, there were customs that really did seem Jewish. Nora Garcia Herrera's father wouldn't eat meat with blood in it. Families consumed unleavened bread in springtime. After Neulander finished her fieldwork and left New Mexico, she started looking for similar practices in other Latino and in Mediterranean cultures. It wasn't long before she ran across the work of the anthropologist Raphael Patai.
IN the s Patai had visited Venta Prieta, a dusty town near Mexico City, where people have been calling themselves Jews at least since the s. Their prayers sometimes included a few sentences in halting Hebrew. In the spring they celebrated Passover, with a seder and flatbread. With their short stature, black hair, and dark skin, the Venta Prietans were indistinguishable from the mestizo Catholic population that dominates Mexico.
Yet they claimed descent from one of the country's Inquisition-era Sephardic families, the Carvajals, and said that their religion was handed down over the centuries from them. As Patai poked through Venta Prieta's history, he accumulated persuasive evidence that its people were not descended from Jews at all.
Instead they were the inheritors of what might be called crypto-Protestantism. In the early decades of this century, it seems, a fundamentalist splinter group called the Church of God Israelite left Mexico City to proselytize elsewhere; some settled in Venta Prieta.
The group was a branch of the Church of God Seventh Day -- a sect originally located in Iowa, and now headquartered in Colorado. As the name suggests, Church of God Seventh Day members observe the sabbath as Jews do, on the last day of the week -- Saturday.
They ignore Christmas and Easter, believing these holidays to be "pagan. They refuse to eat blood sausage or blood pudding, although both are Mexican delicacies. The walls of the church were graced with Stars of David. Years ago the building contained more Stars of David, and also Hebrew writing.
One day some American Jews walked in. They were convinced that the place was a synagogue, and were overjoyed at this discovery. The congregation was deeply embarrassed, and removed the Hebrew and some of the stars.
Yet a number of Stars of David remain visible, and old people still want them on their gravestones. Although the stars are important symbolically and doctrinally, the church is firmly Christian: the congregation's prayers and songs are all dedicated to Jesus. One scenario, which is repeated these days by many televangelists, has it that Jesus will not return to earth until all the world's Jews are gathered together to welcome him back. If present-day Jews are uninterested in doing so, then perhaps they can be replaced by worthier ones, by Jews who accept Christ as the Messiah.
These more promising Jews, in the view of some fundamentalist Protestants, disappeared with the ten lost tribes of Israel. Now they must be found, so that the Savior can return. This logic has engendered a centuries-old preoccupation with identifying certain gentiles as long-lost Jews. During the Reformation some thought the English were one of the tribes. This belief survived in the twentieth-century theology of Herbert Armstrong , the father of the radio evangelist Garner Ted Armstrong , who used to point out that brit is Hebrew for "covenant," and ish means "man"; ergo the British were "the true covenant people.
Africans were a favored group for lost tribehood. At the turn of the century in the Southwest, Church of God proselytizers looked to Latinos.
Mormons, the Church of Holiness, and Seventh-day Adventists also went searching in the Southwest for the lost tribes. Even mainstream New Mexico churches adopted Old Testament motifs: Presbyterians, for instance, held "last suppers" emphasizing the fact that Jesus' last meal was a Passover seder.
Indeed, it seems that in the early twentieth century the hamlets around Santa Fe and Albuquerque were roiling with Hebraic Protestantism, just as Venta Prieta was. One would never know this if one read only the Santa Fe tourist-store books that depict non-Anglo New Mexicans as either kachina dancers or carvers of wooden saints. One might not even know if one's own parents had once experimented with a fundamentalist sect and then abandoned it because Catholic neighbors were getting vicious or because the church leaders decided that Hispanos were not a lost tribe after all.
This seems to be what happened two generations ago, when the Church of God Seventh Day pulled its ministers out of New Mexico. Fifty years later, Neulander believes, the children and grandchildren of former members are recalling their elders' Old Testament customs and misinterpreting their last words about being Jews.
These recollections, Neulander says, have been skewed by Stanley Hordes and others who are ignorant of the Southwest's true recent history. It is a history that includes both fundamentalist Protestants and other groups whose behavior could be wrongly construed as crypto-Judaism. Muslims, too, fled the Inquisition, settled in New Spain, eschewed pork, and ignored priests.
Sephardic immigrants also came to Mexico and the Southwest from countries such as Morocco and Turkey, where they had practiced Judaism openly for centuries. They have intermarried with Latinos, and many have even embraced the Catholic Church.
They might have kept dreidels in the house, but that is no sign of the Inquisition. Word quickly spread among the self-described anusim that the ethnographer who had approached them so enthusiastically a few years earlier was now attacking the very basis of their identity.
Since then conferences of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies have often included presentations in which a speaker criticizes the work of the ungrateful scholar from Indiana. When asked about Neulander, society members often sneer, sometimes without having looked at any of her work. Even those who have done the reading find it easy to despise her. For when Neulander makes her arguments, she presents more than just dry scholarship on Protestantism.
She also speculates about the reasons Hispanos might be inventing what she calls an "imaginary crypto-Jewish identity. Neulander thinks they are doing it because they are, in effect, racists. Colonial Spaniards were obsessed with proving they had "pure" blood, untainted by that of what they regarded as inferior peoples. The same has been true for many New Mexicans, and Neulander believes that the concern for purity -- limpieza de sangre -- is intensifying, now that Hispanos are being boxed in by Anglo newcomers and Mexican immigrants.
As noted, Hispanos have always been loath to be called Mexicans. But that is how Anglos in the region have identified anyone who speaks Spanish.
So, Neulander theorizes, some Hispanos are using crypto-Jewish identity as a postmodern marker for ethnic purity. What better way to be a noble Spaniard than to be Sephardic, since Sephardim almost never marry outside their own narrow ethnic group -- and would certainly not intermarry with Native Americans? Neulander also comes at the racism issue from another, not quite compatible angle. She stresses that Protestant lost-tribes logic is deeply anti-Semitic.
Below its Judeophilic veneer lies the belief that because they reject Jesus, most of today's ethnic Jews will in fact go up in flames at the Apocalypse. Such talk frightens and offends those who call themselves anusim. True, some of them are fixated on finding a noble Spanish past. But some from Hispano families are politically liberal, involved in civil-rights work, and proud of their mestizo complexions and ancestry.
By speculating that the Hispano Presbyterian church was really a secret synagogue for crypto-Jews who wanted to read the Bible, Atencio reconciles his modern, Chicano identity with what he thinks of as his traditional, shamefully Anglo persona.
Such reasoning is far more complicated than anything Neulander has suggested, and it is thus easy for many to dismiss her. She dismisses them and clings to her principles. What her detractors think nowadays does not count anyhow, Neulander believes, since researchers like Hordes have so muddied the crypto-Jewish field that it is no longer possible to tell history from fantasy.
Pessimistic about her chances of landing an academic job, Neulander has been moving around the Midwest, working at whatever comes her way. She currently works in philanthropy at a Jewish organization.
Not long ago she was working part-time at a local public-television station, co-producing shows about the gentle folklore of Indiana. One segment she did was about scarecrows. As for Hordes, he has received generous funding from the estate of a wealthy Jewish woman in New Jersey, and has embarked on an ambitious project: tracing the family trees of self-proclaimed anusim.
Definitely linking them to converts who quit the Continent for the New World, he believes, would strongly support the historical case for the crypto-Jews.
Hordes is undaunted by the concept of powers of two: when lineage is traced back to , each person has depending on whether a generation is counted as thirty years or as twenty-five as many as , to 1,, direct ancestors.
As the demographics shifted, Jewish people made their mark on the community, she said. It was a gift from one of his many Jewish customers. Nearby is a sign of the dual cultures here: a small Catholic shrine with a vase of yellow flowers and a statue of St. The closest thing to a full-fledged grocery store in the town is Kurson Kosher, with a bakery, upstairs kitchen, meat counter and shelves stocked with pita bread and tortillas.
Falafel balls and assorted kosher tamales share space in the freezers that line the back of the store. A few blocks over, Eli Mordo, 50, an Israeli pizza shop owner, is used to people walking into his store and asking why his pizza is so expensive. Mordo explains that kosher food costs more because it has to be prepared in a special way.
She has been giving walking tours of the Jewish parts of Mexico City for 20 years. Unlike Jews in other countries, Jews in Mexico have very low rates of assimilation, she said. Protection against evil, they were gifts from Jewish customers. One of his customers is Mery Mercado. Even though she has to deal with parking as uncompromising as downtown L.
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